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Giannandrea Poesio

Wednesday, 21st May 2008

Royal Ballet: Double Bill
Royal Opera House

Theatre magic has a lot to do with the unpredictability of the performed event. Regardless of the alluring promise of an all-star cast or the doubts raised by daring artistic choices, there is no certain way to forecast what any live performance will be like. Indeed, it is this surprise/disappointment factor that has kept me going for all the years I have spent both on stage and in front of it.

Last week I expressed some serious doubts about a Royal Ballet triple bill. The artistic flatness of the performances I saw impinged seriously on my desire to see more from the same company. But last Saturday I left the Royal Opera feeling in that very good mood so rarely experienced by critics.

Not unlike the previous triple bill, the new programme contrasts a 20th-century masterwork of American ballet history with a milestone of the British 20th-century repertoire. This time, instead of Serenade vs Homage to the Queen it is Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering (1969) vs Frederick Ashton’s The Dream (1964). Robbins’s 63-minute-long plotless ballet to piano music by Chopin, played with romantic gusto and abandon by Philip Gammon, used to be one of the Royal Ballet’s greatest hits in the golden days everyone raves about and claims to remember. I, too, recall those electrifying performances, but I am not willing to draw sterile comparisons; an art as ephemeral as ballet can be effectively evaluated only for what it is now and not in line with the illusory remains of inevitably fading memories. Unlike the Serenade performances I saw two weeks ago, Dances at a Gathering seems to have been restaged with unique care, stylistic finesse and, above all, great attention to the interpretative shadings. The first cast — Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo, Laura Morera, Lauren Cuthbertson, Sarah Lamb, Johan Kobborg, Martin Harvey, Federico Bonelli, Sergei Polunin and José Martín — was simply superb. Each artist conveyed the ballet’s subtle palette of contrasting emotions in such a vibrant way that on several occasions the whole audience held their breath.

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Food for thought

Simon Hoggart

My favourite programme last week was France on a Plate (BBC4, Sunday) in which Dr Andrew Hussey investigated the link between gastronomy and la gloire; French glory and destiny.